Extracts from VOLATILE BODIES, Indiana University Press, USA.

We do not have a body the same way that we have other objects. Being a body is something that we must come to accommodate psychically, something we must live.

The body is a most peculiar “thing,” for its is never quite reducible to being merely a thing; nor does it ever quite manage to rise above the status of a thing.

Far from being inert, passive, noncultural and ahistorical term, the body may be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual and intellectual struggles.

The bifurcation of being … into mind and body, thought and extension, reason and passion, psychology and biology … is not simply a neutral division of an otherwise all-encompassing descriptive field. Dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart.

… at best women’s bodies are judged in terms of a “natural inequality,” as if there were a standard or measure for the value of bodies independent of sex.

Body is what is not mind, what is distinct from and other than the privileged term.